and loving holiness, to have more women than one to his
proper use.... He that takes another man's ox or ass is doubtless
a transgressor; but he that puts himself out of the occasion of
that temptation by keeping of his own seems to be a right honest
and well-meaning man."

More than a century later (1780), an able, learned, and
distinguished London clergyman of high character (who had been a
lawyer before entering the Church), the Rev. Martin Madan, also
advocated polygamy in a book called _Thelyphthora; or, a Treatise
on Female Ruin_. Madan had been brought into close contact with
prostitution through a chaplaincy at the Lock Hospital, and, like
the Puritan advocate of polygamy, he came to the conclusion that
only by the reform of marriage is it possible to work against
prostitution and the evils of sexual intercourse outside
marriage. His remarkable book aroused much controversy and strong
feeling against the author, so that he found it desirable to
leave London and settle in the country. Projects of marriage
reform have never since come from the Church, but from
philosophers and moralists, though not rarely from writers of
definitely religious character. Senancour, who was so delicate
and sensitive a moralist in the sexual sphere, introduced a
temperate discussion of polygamy into his _De l'Amour_ (vol. ii,
pp. 117-126). It seemed to him to be neither positively contrary
nor positively conformed to the general tendency of our present
conventions, and he concluded that "the method of conciliation,
in part, would be no longer to require that the union of a man
and a woman should only cease with the death of one of them."
Cope, the biologist, expressed a somewhat more decided opinion.
Under some circumstances, if all three parties agreed, he saw no
objection to polygyny or polyandry. "There are some cases of
hardship," he said, "which such permission would remedy. Such,
for instance, would be the case where the man or woman had become
the victim of a chronic disease; or, when either party should be
childless, and in other contingencies that could be imagined."
There would be no compulsion in any direction, and full
responsibility as at present. Such cases could only arise
exceptionally, and would not call for social antagonism. For the
most part, Cope remarks, "the best w